Pretty much every kid loves playing with cardboard boxes. Taiwanese photographer and graphic designer Sydney Sie never stopped playing with them. Her series “Unexpectable Boxes” captures the essence of our childhood pretending in surprising and surreal photographs. In bold candy colors, her images reveal her subjects’ faces, fingers and feet peeking out of holes in artificial spaces built by Sie. It’s an optical illusion achieved by a very simple technique of colored papers and boards colored like boxes, which a model then stretches into. In her artist statement, Sie explains the significance of her boxes: “This hole is the only clue from inner and outside, where we see the world from ellipse to square… The mystery is when we want to get more but instead, they are getting far and far away. We follow the path to hide under hiding. Desire is not the end of story but also the necessary to struggle before having it.”

Catch local artists from across Australia at the Yours and Owls Festival in Wollongong this weekend! If you can’t make it there’s loads of free shows across Sydney including Ali Barter, Emma Russack Band, as well as American Rapper Mac Miller at the Metro Theatre.